Practice and Sensemaking: Re-Thinking Senior Selection with Bourdieu and Weick

Board, Douglas

International Journal of Learning and Change, v5 n1 p1-15 2011

Human action takes place under multiple pressures: limited time, patchy understanding and pre-existing commitments to important stakes. Understanding better how intelligent individual action and social order arise in these conditions was a lifelong focus for both Pierre Bourdieu and Karl Weick, articulators, respectively, of the concepts of practice and sensemaking. Working with both concepts, the paper re-thinks what happens when executives are selected to fill senior positions in industries and environments far from the ones in which they learned their skills. An alternative conceptualisation to transferable skills is outlined. In so doing, differences and potential complementarity between practice and sensemaking are explored. (Contains 1 table and 7 notes.)